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Qt Group teamed up with Columbia Road to build a brand new high-volume customer portal on Salesforce to further fuel Qt’s skyrocketing growth. The portal allows Qt’s global customer base to use the subscription solutions fully online and enables excellent customer experiences.
Challenge
Qt Group is a fast-growing software company offering all the tools needed to create software applications and embedded devices that users love. Their cutting-edge solutions are trusted by 1.5 million developers worldwide, and their clients include companies such as Mercedes-Benz, LG, Lufthansa Technik, Nokia and many more.
With their phenomenal growth and expanding customer base, Qt identified the need to offer its users a new and improved customer portal that allows for better experiences and increased self-service capabilities. Moreover, as their business grew, it was vital to build a solution that is scalable to new offering areas and use cases.
Columbia Road was chosen to be Qt’s partner in designing and building the portal, which not only supports creating fully online customer experiences but also accelerates Qt in their growth trajectory.
Our approach
We began our cooperation with Qt with a technical architecture sprint. Throughout the two-week sprint, we were able to form a holistic understanding of the former platform and self-service processes, identifying the use cases for the new portal. Moreover, during the sprint, we analysed and formed suggestions for the potential tools that can be used in building the new customer portal.
After the sprint, the team of professionals from both Qt and Columbia Road got to work building the new portal. The project started with creating a holistic concept design and detailed designs for the portal and its features based on the identified customer needs and use cases. This continued with building, configuring, iterating and finally launching new portal features as they were finalised. Lastly, we set up and optimised the portal’s analytics and data gathering.
The portal is built on Salesforce Experience Cloud. This was a logical choice as Qt already had a mature Salesforce setup for internal processes from lead to quote to provisioning. We also got to help Qt build the foundation for using source and version control in Salesforce development, resulting in enhanced developer experience. The solution built for the customer portal extended existing capabilities of quoting, material downloads, license management, and support.
Since the start, the project has significantly grown in terms of scope and complexity. Along the way, new underlying use cases and customer needs were identified and included in the project. However, as the project grew in scope, the project team grew as well, both in members and competence. The team is especially appreciative of how cooperation and communication have improved throughout the building of the new portal. The broad scope of the project has allowed both Qt’s professionals and Columbia Road’s consultants to grow professionally and form a tight team capable of solving complex challenges in close collaboration.
Impact
With the customer portal, we were been able to build improved self-service capabilities for end-users. The portal seamlessly integrates together licence management services, identity management and sales capabilities.
The portal plays a significant role in Qt’s customers’ experiences, as they’re now able to service themselves. The portal takes into account the myriad of different customer needs that come with having such a broad user base across the globe. The user reception of the portal has been highly positive, and the measured functionalities, such as downloading packages, have received a satisfaction score of 4,26/5.
The portal plays an important part in laying the foundation for Qt’s current and future growth. Already now, as Qt has acquired new businesses, those have been integrated seamlessly to be part of the portal. The portal is designed to also support Qt’s growth trajectory in the future.